Cabins in vehicles, and particularly in aircraft, are designed according to specific criteria, and besides a desired number of passenger seats they also include fittings that serve to enhance comfort in the cabin or raise awareness of safety-critical functions. These may include toilets, galley modules and the like, and may also relate to seats that are designed to be folded away, for use by the cabin crew. Particularly when designing passenger cabins for an aircraft, it is important to create a product that is lightweight yet fulfils many functions, in order to optimize the efficiency of the aircraft. This requires that the fittings be arranged in a highly space saving manner, which may also include creating multifunctional fittings. One possible objective may be considered to be the provision of as many functions for ensuring the comfort or safety of all passengers as possible within the smallest possible space inside the passenger cabin.
Particularly for the purpose of certifying airliners, it is obligatory to provide a cabin crew seat for every member of the cabin crew so that everyone is able to assume a safe position during take-off and landing, but this occupies yet more room in a cabin where space is already at a premium. It is known to mount folding seats on various fixtures for the cabin crew, and to pivot these into a position suitable for seating when they are needed, taking into account that access to other facilities will be blocked while such seats are in use. For example, from German patent document DE 10 2011 016 031 A1 it is known to mount a cabin crew seat on an aircraft galley bulkhead, and attach it so that it is able to pivot.
When designing compact functions in an aircraft passenger cabin, the space available for the associated fittings may be relatively small, which undoubtedly increases awareness of passages and the like, but when they are used heavily by large numbers of people, the edges and corners of adjacent fitting objects may be subjected to frequent bumping by people or objects such as cabin trolleys or items of passengers' luggage. If a cabin crew seat is located on such an edge or corner, it may suffer from quite frequent impacts.